A wise man once said never to quote wise men but I just did so I have
entered a time loop paradox which can only end with a firm period to
punctuate this sentence. What I was trying to get to before that
aforementioned paradoxical unpleasantness – is that it is better to
be a big fish in a small pond than vice versa. All of the sudden I
was in competition with older, better looking, good
looking, driving license having punks for the affections of all the
choice women. I also greatly increased my chances of getting a good
beating for smarting off because some of the kids were old, adult
old. It was a new strange ecosystem where I was the interloper unsure
of the cultures and customs in this strange new place. The first
thing I noticed was that all of the cool kids were wearing backpacks.
Backpacks at school you say, how strange. But wait I will reply,
these were not regular school backpacks but expedition size internal
frame backpacks that would be suitable for an assent on the
north-face of something cool to climb the north face of. I have no
idea how things become cool but if I wore a huge backpack to school
in a vacuum high school I would be thought a fool, but when some cool
kid does it first somehow it is not only acceptable but required for
inclusion into coolness. I sat with a couple f the cool seniors in my
math class and they all had these ungodly huge backpacks and I wanted
in on that worse then I knew could be possible having never even
considered using a backpack at all. I loaded up one of my huge
camping backpacks with stuff I would need at school and missed the
essence of the thing which was that they had sleek new back packs and
I did not. Luckily, I am just to clueless to notice I am doing it
wrong and my essentially wrong back pack seemed so intentionally
wrong that it was taken as an ironic commentary on the backpack
culture that was sweeping the school. Yeah. . .that’s what I meant,
haha. One of my friend's older brothers thought that it was so funny
that I was mocking the cool kids that he brought a thrift store old orange external frame job that could be nothing but a joke and
escalated the back pack arms race to the point that they were
eventually banned in the halls and in classrooms because they were
too much of a distraction. Too bad because I looked good as a
pseudo-Sherpa. Real good.
